#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
